Two months ago, if you’ll recall, the Australian Harry Bryant became an Instagram smash hit when he good-naturedly choked a security guard at the Waco wave pool.

“All I remember was seeing Chip getting head-locked by that security guard,” said Harry. “Chip was sitting down talking to someone, there was some debacle, and then Chippa was in a headlock. My instant reaction was to put him in one and then, before I knew it, I was in one. It was a trilogy of headlocks.”

If you didn’t know, Harry is a twenty-one-year-old Australian with a bushy hairdo and albino moustache that twinkle like glitter on a burlesque dancer’s corset.

This film, which Harry premiered throughout the American east coast post-Waco choke, shows little Harry flying like a hummingbird, deftly and delicately.

To see Koa’s usual cheerfulness replaced by a queer dullness makes the viewer aware of how very nasty Jaws was for the event.

“I’m nervous til I get out there,” says Koa. “I’m pretty nervous when I’m out there, nervous when I’m taking off on a wave, nervous when the wave is landing on my head. The nerves never stop.”

As Koa and Nathan drive to the event, a car stops.

“It’s huge and perfect,” says the driver. “The girls almost…died.”

We see Koa, who suffers terrible seasickness and therefore has to bodysurf from the rock jump-off to collect his board from the support boat in the channel, climbing down the steep muddy trail, hanging onto roots so he doesn’t fall.

He jumps into the maelstrom.

As his heat is about to start, the contest is cancelled. Brother Makua roars up to him on the jetski and tells him he’s not going to surf

“It’s literally, fifty, sixty feet,” says Koa. “You could paddle the size. But the wind? There was nothing they could do. They had to cancel. People would’ve been near death right now.”

Gorgeously compelling.

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The Goons of Doom frontman Vaughan Blakey, big bro of the WSL's Ronnie B, former Surfing World editor and current Swellian.

Australians are aggressive beer drinkers with just about every occasion imaginable yet another excuse to hit the sauce. Births, deaths, weddings, funerals, sporting events, tough day at work, team won the game, in a shit mood, in a great mood, made a sandwich, found five bucks, woke up this morning… they’re all the excuses we need to rip the scab off a frothie and drain that bitter amber nectar. Despite excessive alcohol consumption being linked to an unfathomable number of society’s problems; from health issues to all manner of violence and to death… we continue to embrace drinking as a part of our culture.

Do we have a problem?

Probably.

So what’s the deal with a song like 24 Bottles of Beer, a rousing anthemic scream for the immediate purchase and consumption of an icy cold slab?

I can imagine people thinking it’s a song that glorifies drinking,” says Vaughan Dead, “But it’s actually a piss take on that. I’m always tripping on the manic energy people put into getting fucked up. I mean, it’s definitely not an anti-drinking song so I wouldn’t say it’s addressing the matter, it’s just stepping back and observing the way we rip in, which is pretty fucken hard.”

24 Bottles of Beer was written and recorded in half a day, and harks back to other Goons classics that get a room going nuts while alienating everyone with the slightest penchant for being easily offended. “We make no apologies for that,” says Deadly. “Every song we’ve ever written has the potential to be misinterpreted, mostly cause we like making ourselves laugh, but our music is never mean and we know what we’re making. Even our dumbest shit has a conscience and a heartbeat.”

Having first formed in 2003 on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, the Goons of Doom have since relocated to Byron Bay where they recorded Black Skull Bong in the aptly named village of Goonengerry. A little older and none the wiser, the Goons of Doom have become one of Australian music’s most unlikely stayers.

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Poetic verse at North Point.

Watch: Shaun Manners in “I am unruly, poorly dressed and I am toothless! I am also good surfer!”

Today, Shaun, who is 20 and lives in Margaret River in his mum’s backyard, and his filmer Tom Jennings, have released Blastoid, a thirteen-minute short that is great fun.

A blastoid, and I’m not talking to the biologically aware here, are are an “extinct type of stemmed echinoderm, often referred to as sea buds” and not to be confused with Blastoise, the walking turtle from Pokemon.

Pretty sure this edit’ll get you trembling and jerking in the usual and familiar spasms.